


Heavy Is The Head

by RedheadAmongWolves



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Brief References to PTSD, Character Study, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23266396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedheadAmongWolves/pseuds/RedheadAmongWolves
Summary: Tommy loses his hat. When he gets it back, it's a crown.or, the coronation of a king.
Kudos: 26





	Heavy Is The Head

Polly and Ada pick them up from the train station. Arthur and he’d technically been deployed at different times and places; Shelby brothers scattered across the French plains and beaches and mud fields, but Tommy had sweet-talked an officer into getting them on the same train home, and he’d spent the ride with Arthur gripping his forearm so tightly he started to lose feeling in his hand, but he didn’t dare dislodge his brother. He knew the need for comfort, for familiarity well. Shelby siblings had always grown up close, underfoot and underwing in their too-small home with their too-big brood, but after the war, the proximity doesn’t chafe like it used to. Tommy’s siblings are extensions of himself: his soul outside his body.

They’re both in uniform, but the second their overseeing officer releases them from duty on the platform, both Arthur and Tommy take off their hats, tucking them under their arms. Soldiers’ caps aren’t for Blinders. Not now that they’re back on their territory.

Ada rushes at them through the crowd as soon as she spots them, almost upending them as she flings herself into Tommy’s arms. She’s taller, of course, he notes as he buries his nose in her hair and clings back just as fiercely, and she’s filled out, too, becoming more of a woman.

“Bloody hell I’ve missed you.” Her voice is thick with tears. She pulls off Tommy and throws herself at Arthur, letting Polly step up to press a kiss to Tommy’s cheek. There’s something in her eyes he can’t quite read, but he knows she’s already perfectly aware something’s shifted with their return, more than just the men coming back to take up their jobs and filial duties. He doesn’t know how she knows other than the explanation of _she’s Pol_ , but she does, like she’d been privy to the conversation he and Arthur had had as soon as their train compartment door slid shut with a _snick_.

“Welcome home,” Polly says, and Tommy gives her what he hopes is a smile. It doesn’t feel quite right on his face.

“Here’s this, then,” Ada beams. She fits a wool cap snug over Arthur’s head, and it’s a rough clash against his uniform, but the stitched-in blades glint in the sunlight and Arthur seems to stand a little taller. Tommy turns to accept his, but Polly shakes her head.

“We couldn’t find yours— think John has it hidden away somewhere. But we’ll find it, don’t fret.”

His scalp feels cold as the wind slides its fingers through his hair, but he only nods.

A similar greeting awaits them when they arrive home, too many scrawny elbows of younger Shelbys and Blinders flying, trying to get in hugs and shoulder claps, and Tommy’s eye-level with John now, and Finn’s lost both his front milk teeth. The house, blessedly, is exactly the same, down to the frayed arms of the couch, the smoke-yellowed curtains, the creaky floorboard just inside the kitchen threshold. Tommy feels both impossibly old and absurdly young. Time has frozen and thawed and frozen again.

Satisfied with promises of listening to their stories over dinner, the younger ones scramble off to bring their duffels up to their rooms, Finn declaring a vow to hunt for Tommy’s missing hat, and Polly takes the opportunity to usher the four eldest Shelby siblings into the living room, shutting the doors gently behind them.

Arthur was named for a king: however, the crown does not always fit the head of the first in line.

Before the war, the Shelbys were respected mostly due to their lineage and the place their grandfather had carved for himself and his descendants in the world. After his death, and the disappearance of their father, Arthur started wearing his suits, and the people on the street still bowed their heads, and the Garrison still let them drink for free, but Tommy could sense their footing slipping, like a tremor, deep inside the Earth, not because they no longer deserved the respect, but because the people were frightened of the changing world around them, and the Shelby family, rattled by its losses, was no longer the steady touchstone they yearned for.

Then the war came, and Tommy suddenly had a lot of time to think, down in the tunnels.

He didn’t know who he was named for; he never had the chance to ask. A soldier in a camp outside Paris told him his name meant _twin_ , in the Bible: Jesus had renamed three apostles who all shared the name Judas, to better tell them apart, and he called one Thomas, _twin_ — the same but separate. So, a man robbed of his own title, but renamed by the Lord himself. But that didn’t seem right, for Tommy’s own origin story. No one could take his name from him, no one would dare.

He got to thinking, seeing Arthur’s namesake, that maybe he might be named for Thomas Malory, and wouldn’t that be fitting: Arthur named for the king, but Tommy named for the man who made it all into legend.

He crawled out of France covered in scars of flesh and scars of gold, and maybe the medal gleamed too brightly in contrast to the darkness they’d just left, because Arthur didn’t protest when Tommy proposed his new plan. In fact, he seemed relieved, practically grateful. He told Tommy it made sense.

“You’ve always had the silver tongue, Tommy,” he explained. “You’re the one always thinking. I’m like a live-wire. ‘M not made to sit still, cookin’ up schemes.”

Arthur explains this to Polly, now, in the living room. Tommy stands by the window and looks out at the street, resisting how badly he wants to know Polly’s expression. He focuses instead on Arthur’s voice, amazed yet again by how quickly Arthur had adapted to a role of deference to his younger brother-- on the train he’d insisted on stepping into the hall before Tommy anytime he left to use the lavatory or visit the dining car, and it wasn’t quite as the leading older brother as much as it was protective like a bodyguard. Hell, he’d even taken a swig of Tommy’s coffee before handing it over, like he’d been testing it for poison. Tommy’d been too surprised to say anything.

Still, he can’t help sneaking a glance now, to see Polly, too, take the regime change without batting an eye. “We’ll pass along the word. I’m sure it’ll be a smooth transition. Tommy, you’re to make your first rounds in the morning. I’ll come with.” Not Arthur, though, Tommy knows. Polly had been in charge while the men had been away, and Arthur hadn’t had much time to become the leader in the people’s eyes before. It’s Polly’s onus to hand over the crown to the prince in her show of loyalty, so the others follow suit.

Tommy gives a nod of both thanks and assent. He doesn’t quite trust his voice not to shake like his hands at the moment, hidden in his pockets as they are. He wishes he had his hat.

“Right then,” Ada says. “Can we have supper now? I’m starved.”

After that, things progress quickly.

He’d been respected as second-eldest before, but now, officially the boss of the reinstated Peaky Blinders, it seems everyone is eager to be at his beck and call. Ada has his breakfast waiting in the kitchen every morning when he wakes up. Finn dusts off his suits and polishes his shoes when they get even remotely scuffed. John and Arthur are glued to his sides, opening doors and pouring drinks and snarling at anyone who gets too close or even looks at Tommy funny, and Tommy’s half-convinced someone’s going to spread their coat over a puddle for him to cross until one day it’s pissing rain and Tommy catches fucking Arthur shrugging out of his jacket and stops him.

It’s _bizarre_. Tommy’s not uncomfortable with being the leader— he agrees with Arthur, it just makes sense. He’s got the head for numbers and schemes, the same fire as Arthur blazing in his belly only his is coiled tight and angry and blue, stoked from fury at the world that chewed them up and spit them back out again and said _walk_. The war affected them all, but sometimes Tommy wonders if it really changed him, or just coaxed something cruel and feral out into the light.

Adjusting to being home is a challenge, which Tommy anticipated, but not quite at this level. He can’t fucking stand being in a dark room: there always has to be a candle lit, a log crackling, a matchbook at hand, because if it gets too dark, he can’t always tell where he is when he wakes up from a dream, or orient himself when he mistakes a creak in the pipes as a German chiseling away at dirt and stone on the other side of the wall.

The hunt for his cap continues as well. Polly offers to buy him a new one altogether, but Tommy refuses, because his grandfather had bought him his, purchased too big so he could grow into it. His mother had sewn in the blades. He’d won his first fight with that cap, and plans to lose his last with it, too, so a replacement wouldn’t do. Arthur tells him it won’t do for a king to walk around without a crown, but Tommy tells him if it’s only the crown that makes him king, he shouldn’t be king. That shuts up any naysayers right quick after that.

Tommy’s one sanctuary, when he’s grating at the walls of the house and the constant people swarming around him like a million bees, is the stables. Charlie leaves him alone when he sees him, sometimes handing Tommy a brush or a bucket of oats on his way past. Then it’s just Tommy and the horses.

He’d tried to get a job working with them in France, before they’d put him in the tunnels, because Tommy’s always adored horses. They’re powerful, beautiful creatures, tall and proud and able to flatten your ass if you’re not careful. Tommy has plans brewing about the races, but at the moment he doesn’t particularly feel like thinking, so he lets himself into a stall and says hello to a red mare as he takes up the brush.

There’s a lot of pressure on his shoulders, that’s only increasing with each day. He can feel something coming, feels it just like he did in the tunnels, or the months before the war when he snuck out onto the roof in the morning before the house woke, to watch the dawn and the clouds like he could see what was coming in the future on the horizon line itself.

He’s grateful for an advisor like Polly, but his main priority is to keep his family safe, give them a life that no one can take from them, make them as sturdy and unshakeable as stone, so they don’t have to bend to anyone’s orders ever again, so they can provide for themselves and their children, and he’d rather die than see anyone get hurt, so the ugly and bitter work of it all falls to him. The writer of the Shelby mythos, only the ink is blood.

“What do you suppose, hmm? Am I in over my head?” he asks the mare quietly, as he runs the brush down a silky flank. She nickers at him, and he smiles, almost teasing. “Oh really?”

“What’d she say?” a voice asks, and Tommy almost, _almost_ flinches, but he only stops his reflex to reach for his gun when he recognizes the voice as Polly’s. Polly steps closer, hay crunching underfoot as she reaches up to pat the horse’s nose. It whinnies softly. “I couldn’t ever translate as well as you or your mother could.”

Tommy continues brushing for a long moment, watching the mare’s coat turn downy soft, focusing on the rhythmic stroke of the bristles. Polly waits patiently, as she always does.

“She said it’s a good thing I’ve lost my hat, because it’d be the only thing left of me bobbing downstream,” he says finally, opting for truth.

“You couldn’t have been the eldest,” Polly says in answer, “because you needed to learn to defend yourself just as much as you needed to learn to fight. That’s what makes a leader, Tommy. Knowing how to throw a punch but knowing how to block one, how to dodge one, and most importantly, knowing how to take one, too.”

The brush stills in Tommy’s hand. He looks at Polly, who arches an eyebrow and smiles that pursed-lip smile of hers, the one that makes him love her so fiercely, Polly who knows all, Polly he’s never had to doubt, Polly who’s never doubted him.

He’s not good at articulating his feelings, so he only gives Polly a nod and points to the wall behind her. “Hand me that hoof pick?”

She does.

He goes home, and down the hall to his room, and into his closet, where he unlocks a chest tucked against the back wall, secret and safe in its shadows from nosy little siblings. He sifts carefully through its contents: a flyer from the first boxing match Arthur took him to, a wooden horse figure, a few wrinkled magazines, an empty tin of the mints his father loved, his mother’s comb, his mother’s shawl.

He pulls out the shawl, folded in a neat bundle of wine-purple silk and dusty-rose pink fringe, and unwraps it with fingers that have finally stopped trembling. Nestled in the fabric, exactly where he’d left it before he’d shipped out, four years and a lifetime ago, to return to when he finally made his way home, a promise to himself to survive and keep surviving, is his hat.

He sets it on his head and tugs it down over his brow, where it’s a perfect fit.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't watched Peaky Blinders in a hundred million years but I've always wanted to do a pre-canon study of Tommy taking over as leader so here! we! are! If they gave a different origin story later on in the actual show I didn't see it lol so if that's the case this is an AU
> 
> comments & kudos much appreciated!!! <3
> 
> don’t own/don’t profit/etc etc 
> 
> title from Shakespeare but also Crown by Stormzy because ooooof


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